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Joswiak went over the points in turn, but first said that they set out from the beginning to do a fair and even comparison, which is why they used an independent lab and provided full disclosure of the methods used in the tests, which would be "a silly way to do things" if Apple were intending to be deceptive.

He said Veritest used gcc for both platforms, instead of Intel's compiler, simply because the benchmarks measure two things at the same time: compiler, and hardware. To test the hardware alone, you must normalize the compiler out of the equation -- using the same version and similar settings -- and, if anything, Joswiak said, gcc has been available on the Intel platform for a lot longer and is more optimized for Intel than for PowerPC.

He conceded readily that the Dell numbers would be higher with the Intel compiler, but that the Apple numbers could be higher with a different compiler too.

Joswiak added that in the Intel modifications for the tests, they chose the option that provided higher scores for the Intel machine, not lower. The scores were higher under Linux than under Windows, and in the rate test, the scores were higher with hyperthreading disabled than enabled. He also said they would be happy to do the tests on Windows and with hyperthreading enabled, if people wanted it, as it would only make the G5 look better.

In the G5 modifications, they were made because shipping systems will have those options available. For example, memory read bypass was turned on, for even though it is not on by default in the tested prototypes, it will be on by default for the shipping systems. Software-based prefetching was turned off and a high-performance malloc was used because those options will be available on the shipping systems (Joswiak did not know whether this malloc, which is faster but less memory efficient, will be the default in the shipping systems).

As to not using SSE2, Joswiak said they enabled the correct flags for it, as documented on the gcc web site, so that SSE2 was enabled (the Veritest report lists the options used for each test, which appears to include the appropriate flags).

My PC is a piece of crap, I got what I paid for. Now that the 3 year mark is approaching (I buy a new machine every 3 years, or so), I think I am just going to drop the money for the mid-range G5 tower. I really don't care if the Mac is slower and more expensive than a PC, I have the money to spend, and I want a nice box.

Fuck all you poor, dirty, Lunix PC hippies... welcome to the real world.

And that's not to mention the benefits for OSS compilers. Imagine the kind of resources and funding processor companies would dump into open source compiler projects if they were going to be the basis for their benchmark scores instead of their closed source proprietary compilers.

"So, Bob's been looking at those Intel diagrams for quite some time now."

"Yeah, I wonder if it's anything to do with his new assistants and Porsche."

Somehow this shifty Apple exec ignored the boldest claim of the bunch:

Misleading Prices

Both Apple and Dell are guilty of using misleading prices. For example, Apple gives the price of the low-end G5 as "$1999", and the high-end G5 as "$2999". In other words, they have subtracted $1 from a $3000 computer to make it seem cheaper, which is absolutely ridiculous. This demonstrates that both Apple and Dell are willing to mislead people when stating their prices.

What do you have to say now mister Joswiak if that is in fact your real name?

Oh, yeah. Steve probably said "hey, vendors, come on over and do a little demo. Yeah, it'll be a duel, but don't worry about recompiling for the G5 (which is supposed to be trivial). We'll just see what happens."

Look -- they spent every last minute they could optimizing the builds they used for the demo - don't doubt it for a minute. On the other hand, every last minute probably wasn't all that long, and the demos did kick ass.

Actually, my favorite was the Mathematica guy who commented (IIRC) "We tried to come up with an example to show how being able to use more than 4GB of memory was helpful, but we couldn't come up with an example that didn't crash the Xeon"

if I can't play any fucking games on it. Maybe if they got some god damn software it wouldn't be a worthless piece of over-priced shit. Let's face it, do you need a G5 to check your fucking email you bitch?!?! Because you're not doing anything else with it. You want pretty colors? Bring it by my place and I'll fucking spray paint the damn thing for you. Hell, I'll throw in a botanical scent for free.

"Mac Heads" term is racist and inflamatory. We prefer the term "The imminent owners of the Fastest 64-bit Personal Computer in the World"

To be pendantic you should also note that they are 'imminent owners of the slowest 64-bit Personal Computer in the World', with the understanding that it is the only 64-bit Personal Computer in the World (at least until the AMD chips start showing up on PC's.)

I do think that it is cool that Apple gets to claim the crown for a while, even if only for a couple of months. On the other hand, how important 64-bit computing will be for the PC market remains to be seen.

Except that if Apple did move to AMD/Intel, they'd have to dump all the classic and carbon apps, and become a new OS with no support. The same awesome strategy that saw BeOS achieve such mammoth success.

What an awesome way to bring in a bunch of new users- chuck away all the old ones. OS X could join the glorious ranks of MS/intel competitors like DR-DOS, PC Geos, OS/2 and BeOS!

Plus they'd be inundated with whingeing users wanting to know why their windows only scanner doesn't work with OS X when they're using a PC,

Plus! with the tremendous advantage of having to support every piece of shit network card and graphics chipset under the sun, they'd be able to take advantage of the same legendary performance and stability offered by Wintel PCs today.

Your genius is wasted on Slashdot, go and apply for a job as a CEO at a multi-millon dollar company today!